Spitfire Audio’s new Spitfire Swarms collection brings together three of its standalone libraries – Harp Swarm, Marimba Swarm, and Mandolin Swarm – into a unified collection for Kontakt Player.
The Swarms collection is suited to composers and producers looking to craft cinematic soundscapes, game scores or other intricate orchestral compositions. It creates choirs from rarely grouped instruments, arranged around AIR Studios, Lyndhurst Hall – offering nine harps, a marimba orchestra, plus 18 mandolins, charangos and ukuleles.
According to a press release shared with MusicTech, the ‘Swarms’ concept is inspired by Pointillism – a technique of neo-impressionist fine art developed in 1886 by artist Georges Seurat, “whereby the use of discrete tiny dots of pure colour become blended in the eye of the viewer with the aim of producing a greater degree of luminosity and brilliance of colour”. Musically, Swarms mirrors the technique to create a fuller range of tones, achieved as small discrete short notes that coalesce in the ear of the listener.
Users can experiment with a range of articulations (long tremolo, short tremolo, long pluck, short pluck, or harmonic pluck, for example), and can toy with user-mixable Close, Tree, AMB. (Ambient), and OUT. (Outriggers) microphone positioning.
Everything has been originally recorded through an array of vintage microphones via Neve ‘Montserrat’ pre-amps to a Studer two-inch tape machine and onwards into the digital domain (at 96K via Prism AD converters) by engineer Jake Jackson, one of the UK’s biggest names in film-score engineering and mixing.
Paul Thomson, Spitfire Audio’s co-founder and composer, comments, “These ‘Swarms’ are incredibly useful, both when you want to play longer, slow-moving chords that have an internal movement and bubbling sound instead of using pads or traditional orchestral longs, and also when you want a percussive sound unlike anything you’ve ever heard before.” He adds, “Having nine harps or nine marimbas is such a unique texture to have as another invaluable tool to make your music stand out and sound different.”
Find out more about Swarms over at Spitfire Audio.
